Auden, W.H.
(York 1907-1973 Wien) : Dichter, Schriftsteller, Professor of Poetry, Oxford University ; amerikanische Staatsbürgerschaft
Name Alternative(s)
Auden, Wystan Hugh
Subjects
Index of Names : Occident
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Literature : Occident : Great Britain
Chronology Entries (33)
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| 1 | 1937- |
W.H. Auden and China : general. 2005 Stuart Christie : In China, Auden learned that the best poems often do not survive the journey home. I suggest that Auden's experience in China and Hong Kong ultimately motivates his symbolic disinvestment from all national-colonial allegories, in favor of the rejection of material context entirely, as a more principled basis for the writing of poetry. China serves mainly as an occult imagining against which the poet attempts to locate his increasingly liminal position in nationalist British culture and letters. Auden's sonnets engage with orientalizing and occidentalizing codes that challenge the British canon overtly and covertly, a concert that has at least two effects : first, a reaction against the colonial elite in Hong Kong and Shanghai, where Auden was hailed as an emerging talent ; and subsequently, a disorientation in the poetry resulting from the absence of what heretofore had been a coded familiarity of context – the call of homosexual traveling culture. Auden's canonical context was British, and that its ideology trailed him to China is an undeniable fact constituting much of the poet's cross-cultural predicament, what I call his disorientations, once he arrived there. Isherwood and Auden found themselves feted in the bosom of the British colonial establishment in Hong Kong, enjoying comforts in marked contrast to the war of liberation being waged by the Chinese against Japanese aggression just to the north in Guangdong province. In Spain, Auden saw mindless violence fully exercised in the name of nationalist confraternity. On arrival in China, he had no reason not to expect the same practice among the Japanese, Guomindang, and Communist forces. If Spain had occasioned Auden's encounter with the extreme tendencies of political change and disillusioned him, China forced him to reconsider and to affirm the liberal muddle of the ideological middle that E.M. Forster's position had always represented. Auden went to China empty of prejudice, a fact that encompasses equally his relative ignorance of Chinese language and culture as well as his principled willingness to dispense, as best he could, with the received wisdom of the career colonialists. Hong Kong's colonial resituation of Western values evidences, in Auden's case, the globalizing pressure placed on modernist poetry when faced with local mutations beyond the metropolitan ken. The colonial locale has erased the poet's memory of a British past and his Chinese present in equal measure, substituting for it only the eternal 'chatter' of power brokers at work. Without adequate knowledge of Chinese peoples or cultures as subjects, the poet cannot surveil China faithfully, he stalks and then kills it. Alternatively, he risks 'making' the English modernist canon new using Chinese materials, but entirely at the expense of the Chinese context, and again assassinates present truth. Not daring to risk orientalist platitudes shared among Chinese-English brothers as soldiers-in-arms, Auden's poet-assassin threatens the Chinese subject and himself in turn. Auden's rejection of national culture is linked equally to his specific historical context in Hong Kong and China that rendered his 'retour' at once disjunctive and homologous of uniquely colonial frontiers he could not cross, even as a homosexual 'passing through' privileged sites of British masculinity abroad. Auden can no longer simply remint English certainties in the Chinese context and call them a lost signified of oriental fantasy. The sonnets respond by invoking Chinese inscrutability to ward off unwarranted incursions the poet himself represents ; by conceding the universal presumptions of colonialism. 2007 Hugh Haughton : Where Isherwood's prose is personal, circumstantial and documentary, recording the details of their three-month journey as 'amateur war correspondents' in often comit terms. Auden's gnomic verse casts the war into an abstract allegorial idiom with almost no specific geographical, historical or personal indicators. |
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| 2 | 1937.2 | W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood were commissioned by Faber and Faber in London and Random House in New York to write a book about the Far East. The authors decided that their subject would be the war which had been provoked by the Japanese in July with Marshal Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist forces in China.Isherwood's reportage was to provide a prose commentary on China and its war, while Auden would write about the war parabolically to provide a theory of human violence. |
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| 3 | 1938.01.19 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood went to Marseilles, where they boarded the "Aramis" for a journey to Hong Kong. |
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| 4 | 1938.02.16-28 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood arrived in Hong Kong and stayed there 12 days. |
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| 5 | 1938.02.28 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood left Hong Kong in the Tai-Shan for Guangzhou. "The railway was being bombed, almost daily, by Japanese planes… The river-boats, which were British-owned, had never been bombed at all". In Guangzhou the British Consul General sent a car. They were to stay at Paak Hok Tung, a settlement of American and English missionaries. The next day they visited Mayor Zang Yanfu. The next day they were invited to lunch with Wu Dezhen. The next two days they were wandering about the city. |
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| 6 | 1938.03.04 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood left Guangzhou for Hankou by train. |
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| 7 | 1938.03.08 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood in Hankou. "This is the real capital of war-time China. All kinds of people live in this town – Chiang Kai-shek, Agnes Smedley, Chou En-lai ; generals, ambassadors, journalists, foreign naval officers, soldiers of fortune, airmen, missionaries, spies… The Consul has offered us the hospitality of a big empty room." They visit Bishop Logan H. Roots. |
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| 8 | 1938.03.09 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood attended a press conference in Hankou. |
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| 9 | 1938 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood went to interview William Henry Donald in Hankou. |
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| 10 | 1938.03.12 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood met General Alexander von Falkenhausen and Agnes Smedley in Hankou. |
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| 11 | 1938.03.14 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood met Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang May-ling Soong in Wuchang. |
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| 12 | 1938.03.17 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood left Hankou by train for Zhengzhou (Henan) with her interpreter Chiang. The next day they visited the American Mission Hospital. |
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| 13 | 1938.03.19-24 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood arrive by train and stay in Shangqiu. |
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| 14 | 1938.03.24 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood arrived in Suzhou by train at the Garden Hotel. |
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| 15 | 1938.03.25 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood met General Li Zongren in Suzhou. |
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| 16 | 1938.03.27 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood left Suzhou in hired rickshaws for Liuzhuan. |
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| 17 | 1938.03.29-04.10 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood travelled by train and stayed in Xi'an. |
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| 18 | 1938.04.13-14 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood travelled by train and returned to Hankou. |
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| 19 | 1938.04.20 |
Letter from W.H. Auden to Eric R. Dodds. "Looking for the war in China is like a novel by Kafka." |
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| 20 | 1938.04.21 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood attended a party with a number of Hankou intellectuals including the poet Mu Mutian who presented them with some verses written in their honor and Tian Shouchang [Tian Han]. Ma Tongna interviewed them for the newspaper Da gong bao. |
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| 21 | 1938.04.22-29 |
W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood stayed in Hankou. Interview of Ma Tongna with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood in Da gong bao included a Chinese rendering of Auden's sonnet together with a manuscript facsimile in modification. They visited the Wuhan University, met Agnes Smedley, Alexander von Falkenhausen and Du Yuesheng. |
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| 22 | 1938.04.30-05.07 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood travelled to Jiujiang and Nanchang. They stayed at the Burlington Hotel in Nanchang. They visited the Amercian Mission Hospital, Governor of Jiangxi, General Xiong Shihui. |
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| 23 | 1938.05.08-20 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood travelled and stayed in Jinhua. They met General, Governor Zhejiang Huang Shaohong. They visited Lanxi, Tunki (11 May waiting for the permission to got to the front), Tai hu, Tianmu Shan, Tipu, Anji, Xiaofeng (Zhejiang). They met Peter Fleming. |
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| 24 | 1938.05.20-22 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood leaved Jinhua for Wenzhou (Zhejiang). |
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| 25 | 1938.05.25-06.12 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood stayed in Shanghai. They met Ambassador Archibald John Kerr and Rewi Alley. |
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| 26 | 1938.06.12 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood left Shanghai, sailed via Japan to Vancouver and on July 2 they reached New York and went back to England. | |
| 27 | 1938.11.6-12.2 | W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood lectured on 6 November at the Group Theatre, on 28 November at Dulwich and on 2 December at Bedford College in London on China in wartime. | |
| 28 | 1939 |
Auden, W.H. ; Isherwood, Christopher. Journey to a war [ID D3432]. Sekundärliteratur Plomer, William. Review of Auden, W.H. ; Isherwood, Christopher. Journey to a war [ID D3432]. In : London Mercury ; vol. 39 (April 1939). Commissioned by their publishers to write a travel book about the Far East, Messrs. Auden and Isherwood chose to go to China, and spent four months there last year. They now offer the reader who has never been there 'some pmpression of what he would be likely to see, and of what kind of stories he would be likely to hear '. The book contains a travel dairy by Mr. Isherwoods, and poems and many excellent photographs by Mr. Auden. That these two writers were enterprising goes without saying. Starting from Hong Kong, they journeyed by way of Cantin, Hankow, and Sian, and ended up at Shanghai. They travelled by boat, by car, by train, by rickshaw, on horse-back, on foot. As guests, as interviewers, as English visitors, as fellow-travellers, they encountered all kinds of people, ambassadors, beggars, an American bishop, Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife, doctors, missionaries, Mr. Peter Fleming, servants, soldiers, intellectuals. They visited hospitals and film-studios, dealt with bugs and dystnery, air-raids and ennui, and made their way to the front, or perhaps we had better say the scene of military operations. All this has resulted in a various and lively commentary ; no bouquet of recollections in transquillity ; not the work of someone with a knowledge of the Chinese language, or of Chinese or Japanese history and culture ; but a collection of snapshots by two extremely animated minds, and like any collection of snapshots uneven and miscellaneous… He [Isherwood] gives us, so to speak, a feature-film of China at war, the sense of distances, of millions of people very much at sea, of political cross-currents, of chaos, and reminds us continually the 'war is untidy, inefficient, ofscure and largely a matter of chance '. In the end one is left, perhaps inevitably, with a clearer impression of the Europeans and Americans encountered than the Chinese… Neither Mr. Auden nor Mr. Ishterwood attempts at all to account for the behavior of the Japanese or to make the least allowance for that race, which like very other, has its virtues – and its liberal intellectuals. They are satisfied to see China as a 'cultured pacific ountry ' attacked by a 'brutal upstart enemy '… Edward Callan : First part : "London to Hong-Kong", is a series of poems by Auden on the outward journey via the Mediterranean, Suez, and the Red Sea. It includes The voyage, The sphinx, and The ship, written on the journey, and Macao and Hong Kong added later. Second part : "Travel-Diary", is Isherwood's prose account of their experiences in China – derived from their separate diaries – which comprises most of the book. Third part : "Picture Commentary" has forty-five photographs, mostly by Auden, and two stills from the Chinese film Flight in the Last. Fourth part : "In Time of War : a sonnet sequence with a verse commentry", Auden's verse contribution. Of the twenty-seven sonnets, twenty are retained, slightly revised and rearranged, as Sonnets from China in Auden's Collected poems. Douglas Brown : Reread today, Journey appears as a pivotal work registering turning points in the careers of both Auden and Isherwood, and intimating interrelated developments in twentieth-century political, social, literary, religious and sexual history. Complicated by multiplying ironies and compositional discontinuities, Journey reveals incipient postcolonial and postmodernist sensibilities, and involves significant statements about fascism, communism, imperialism, democracy, war, representation and the ethics of modern homosexuality. Journey unfolds a particularly transformative Chinese encounter, in which the experiences of China's otherness and its military disaster are the essential motivating occasions of the acute state of self-reflexivity and the ideological and ethical turning points that Journey records. Though the book achieves less as a study of China than as an instance of exemplary literary self-consciousness and Western self-examination, it has been more frequently appreciated for its historical details than its literary merit. Journey offers vital glimpses of Kuomintang China consumed by the Anti-Japanese War, of the consequent refugee catastrophe, of the tempered optimism of the Nationalist/Communist United Front, and of the febrile hopefulness in the provisional capital of Wuhan in the months after the Nanking atrocity. It also memorably presents the situations of a diverse array of foreigners then active in China. |
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| 29 | 1939 |
Auden, W.H. Macao. In : Auden, W.H. ; Isherwood, Christopher. Journey to a war [ID D3432]. A weed from Catholic Europe, it took root Between some yellow mountains and a sea, Its gay stone houses an exotic fruit A Portugal-cum-China oddity Rococo images of saint and Saviour Promise its gamblers fortunes when they die, Churches alongside brothels testify That faith can pardon natural behaviour. A town of such indulgence need not fear Those mortal sins by which the strong are killed And limbs and governments are torn to pieces. Religious clocks will strike, the childish vices Will safeguard the low virtues of the child And nothing serious can happen here. Sekundärliteratur George Monteiro : W.H. Auden's moral picture of Macao, now presented unobtrusively against a background of major wars, is one of greater destruction. The "men" who are torn to pieces become metonymically (and more graphically) "limbs"" and death--the sins that were major--have become "mortal." Other alterations affect tone, making it more colloquial. Moreover, his early modernist tendency to universalize gives way to greater particularity, to specifying and naming things. Macao ceases to be a "city" and becomes--rather off-handedly--a "town." While the original fourth line--"And grew on China imperceptibly"--turns into an accusation. The poet now makes Portugal directly responsible for introducing the European Catholicism that has given Macao its peculiar moral character. Macao is now "a Portugal-cum-China oddity." Why make this quasi-observation into an accusation? In the context of Auden's personal moral landscape, Macao in 1938 embodies cultural oppositions and moral contradictions. Churches and brothels stand side by side, and (transvalued) vice has become, as in William Blake, the protector of virtue. The "town" is a place of sin and indulgence (recalling, perhaps, the sale of indulgences in an earlier time) for which there appears to be no punishment. Portugal has coupled with China to give birth to Macao. Given this context, it is appropriate that the Latin term cum, which gives Auden's phrase an ecclesiastical tinge, evokes as well its near-homonym in English, carrying with its connotative hint of the philoprogenerative. |
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| 30 | 1939 |
Auden, W.H. Hong-Kong. In : Auden, W.H. ; Isherwood, Christopher. Journey to a war [ID D3432]. The leading characters are wise and witty; Substantial men of birth and education, With wide experience of administration, They know the manners of a modern city. Only the servants enter unexpected; Their silence has a fresh dramatic use: Here in the East the bankers have erected A worthy temple to the Comic Muse. Ten thousand miles from home and What's-Her-Name The bugle on the Late Victorian hill Puts out the soldier's light; off-stage, a war [Text in Journey to a war] Thuds like the slamming of a distant door: Each has his comic role in life to fill, Though Life be neither comic nor a game. = [Text in Sonnets from China] Thuds like the slamming of a distant door: We cannot postulate a General Will; For what we are, we have ourselves to blame. |
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| 31 | 1940 |
Auden, W.H. As I walked out one evening. In : Auden, W.H. From another time. (New York, N.Y. : Random House, 1940). http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15551. I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street |
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| 32 | 1966 |
Auden, W.H. Sonnets from China [ID D30728]. I So from the years their gifts were showered: each Grabbed at the one it needed to survive; Bee took the politics that suit a hive, Trout finned as trout, peach moulded into peach, And were successful at their first endeavour. The hour of birth their only time in college, They were content with their precocious knowledge, To know their station and be right for ever. Till, finally, there came a childish creature On whom the years could model any feature, Fake, as chance fell, a leopard or a dove, Who by the gentlest wind was rudely shaken, Who looked for truth but always was mistaken, And envied his few friends, and chose his love. II They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden: It taught them nothing new. They hid their pride, But did not listen much when they were chidden: They knew exactly what to do outside. They left. Immediately the memory faded Of all they'd known: they could not understand The dogs now who before had always aided; The stream was dumb with whom they'd always planned. They wept and quarrelled: freedom was so wild. In front maturity as he ascended Retired like a horizon from the child, The dangers and the punishments grew greater, And the way back by angels was defended Against the poet and the legislator. III Only a smell had feelings to make known, Only an eye could point in a direction, The fountain's utterance was itself alone: He, though, by naming thought to make connection Between himself as hunter and his food; He felt the interest in his throat and found That he could send a servant to chop wood Or kiss a girl to rapture with a sound. They bred like locusts till they hid the green And edges of the world: confused and abject, A creature to his own creation subject, He shook with hate for things he'd never seen, Pined for a love abstracted from its object, And was oppressed as he had never been. IV He stayed, and was imprisoned in possession: By turns the seasons guarded his one way, The mountains chose the mother of his children. In lieu of conscience the sun ruled his day. Beyond him, his young cousins in the city Pursued their rapid and unnatural courses, Believed in nothing but were easy-going, Far less afraid of strangers than of horses. He, though, changed little, But took his colour from the earth, And grew in likeness to his fowls and cattle. The townsman thought him miserly and simple, Unhappy poets took him for the truth, And tyrants held him up as an example. V His care-free swagger was a fine invention: Life was too slow, too regular, too grave. With horse and sword he drew the girls' attention, A conquering hero, bountiful and brave, To whom teen-agers looked for liberation: At his command they left behind their mothers, Their wits were sharpened by the long migration, His camp-fires taught them all the horde were brothers. Till what he came to do was done: unwanted, Grown seedy, paunchy, pouchy, disappointed, He took to drink to screw his nerves to murder, Or sat in offices and stole, Boomed at his children about Law and Order, And hated life with heart and soul. VI He watched the stars and noted birds in flight; A river flooded or a fortress fell: He made predictions that were sometimes right; His lucky guesses were rewarded well. Falling in love with Truth before he knew Her, He rode into imaginary lands, By solitude and fasting hoped to woo Her, And mocked at those who served Her with their hands. Drawn as he was to magic and obliqueness, In Her he honestly believed, and when At last She beckoned to him he obeyed, Looked in Her eyes: awe-struck but unafraid, Saw there reflected every human weakness, And knew himself as one of many men. VII He was their servant (some say he was blind), Who moved among their faces and their things: Their feeling gathered in him like a wind And sang. They cried 'It is a God that sings', And honoured him, a person set apart, Till he grew vain, mistook for personal song The petty tremors of his mind or heart At each domestic wrong. Lines came to him no more; he had to make them (With what precision was each strophe planned): Hugging his gloom as peasants hug their land, He stalked like an assassin through the town, And glared at men because he did not like them, But trembled if one passed him with a frown. VIII He turned his field into a meeting-place, Evolved a tolerant ironic eye, Put on a mobile money-changer's face, Took up the doctrine of Equality. Strangers were hailed as brothers by his clocks, With roof and spire he built a human sky, Stored random facts in a museum box, To watch his treasure set a paper spy. All grew so fast his life was overgrown, Till he forgot what all had once been made for: He gathered into crowds but was alone, And lived expensively but did without, No more could touch the earth which he had paid for, Nor feel the love which he knew all about. IX He looked in all His wisdom from His throne Down on the humble boy who herded sheep, And sent a dove. The dove returned alone: Song put a charmed rusticity to sleep. But He had planned such future for this youth: Surely, His duty now was to compel, To count on time to bring true love of truth And, with it, gratitude. His eagle fell. It did not work: His conversation bored The boy, who yawned and whistled and made faces, And wriggled free from fatherly embraces, But with His messenger was always willing To go where it suggested, and adored, And learned from it so many ways of killing. X So an age ended, and its last deliverer died In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe: The sudden shadow of a giant's enormous calf Would fall no more at dusk across their lawns outside. They slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt A sterile dragon lingered to a natural death, But in a year the slot had vanished from the heath; A kobold's knocking in the mountain petered out. Only the sculptors and the poets were half-sad, And the pert retinue from the magician's house Grumbled and went elsewhere. The vanquished powers were glad To be invisible and free; without remorse Struck down the silly sons who strayed into their course, And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad. XI Certainly praise: let song mount again and again For life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, For vegetal patience, for animal courage and grace: Some have been happy; some, even, were great men. But hear the morning's injured weeping and know why: Ramparts and souls have fallen; the will of the unjust Has never lacked an engine; still all princes must Employ the fairly-noble unifying lie. History opposes its grief to our buoyant song, To our hope its warning. One star has warmed to birth One puzzled species that has yet to prove its worth: The quick new West is false, and prodigious but wrong The flower-like Hundred Families who for so long In the Eighteen Provinces have modified the earth. XII Here war is harmless like a monument: A telephone is talking to a man; Flags on a map declare that troops were sent; A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan For living men in terror of their lives, Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon, Who can be lost and are, who miss their wives And, unlike an idea, can die too soon. Yet ideas can be true, although men die: For we have seen a myriad faces Ecstatic from one lie, And maps can really point to places Where life is evil now. Nanking. Dachau. XIII Far from a cultural centre he was used: Abandoned by his general and his lice, Under a padded quilt he turned to ice And vanished. He will never be perused When this campaign is tidied into books: No vital knowledge perished in that skull; His jokes were stale; like wartime, he was dull; His name is lost for ever like his looks. Though runeless, to instructions from headquarters He added meaning like a comma when He joined the dust of China, that our daughters Might keep their upright carriage, not again Be shamed before die dogs, that, where are waters, Mountains and houses, may be also men. XIV They are and suffer; that is all they do; A bandage hides the place where each is living, His knowledge of the world restricted to A treatment metal instruments are giving. They lie apart like epochs from each other (Truth in their sense is how much they can bear; It is not talk like ours but groans they smother), From us remote as plants: we stand elsewhere. For who when healthy can become a foot? Even a scratch we can't recall when cured, But are boisterous in a moment and believe Reality is never injured, cannot Imagine isolation: joy can be shared. And anger, and the idea of love. XV As evening fell the day's oppression lifted; Tall peaks came into focus; it had rained: Across wide lawns and cultured flowers drifted The conversation of the highly trained. Thin gardeners watched them pass and priced their shoes; A chauffeur waited, reading in the drive, For them to finish their exchange of views: It looked a picture of the way to live. Far off, no matter what good they intended, Two armies waited for a verbal error With well-made implements for causing pain, And on the issue of their charm depended A land laid waste with all its young men slain, Its women weeping, and its towns in terror. XVI Our global story is not yet completed. Crime, daring, commerce, chatter will go on, But, as narrators find their memory gone, Homeless, disterred, these know themselves defeated. Some could not like nor change the young and mourn for Some wounded myth that once made children good, Some lost a world they never understood, Some saw too clearly all that man was born for. Loss is their shadow-wife, Anxiety Receives them like a grand hotel, but where They may regret they must: their doom to bear Love for some far forbidden country, see A native disapprove them with a stare And Freedom s back in every door and tree. XVII Simple like all dream-wishes, they employ The elementary rhythms of the heart. Speak to our muscles of a need for joy: The dying and the lovers bound to part Hear them and have to whistle. Ever new, They mirror every change in our position, They are our evidence of how we do, The very echoes of our lost condition. Think in this year what pleased the dancers best, When Austria died, when China was forsaken, Shanghai in flames and Teruel re-taken. France put her case before the world: Partout Il y a de la joie. America addressed Mankind: Do you love me as I love you ? XVIII Chilled by the Present, its gloom and its noise, On waking we sigh for an ancient South, A warm nude age of instinctive poise, A taste of joy in an innocent mouth. At night in our huts we dream of a part In the balls of the Future: each ritual maze Has a musical plan, and a musical heart Can faultlessly follow its faultless ways. We envy streams and houses that are sure, But, doubtful, articled to error, we Were never nude and calm as a great door, And never will be faultless like our fountains: We live in freedom by necessity, A mountain people dwelling among mountains. XIX When all our apparatus of report Confirms the triumph of our enemies, Our frontier crossed, our forces in retreat, Violence pandemic like a new disease, And Wrong a charmer everywhere invited, When Generosity gets nothing done, Let us remember those who looked deserted: To-night in China let me think of one Who for ten years of drought and silence waited, Until in Muzot all his being spoke, And everything was given once for all. Awed, grateful, tired, content to die, completed, He went out in the winter night to stroke That tower as one pets an animal. XX Who needs their names? Another genus built Those dictatorial avenues and squares, Gigantic terraces, imposing stairs, Men of a sorry kennel, racked by guilt, Who wanted to persist in stone for ever: Unloved, they had to leave material traces, But these desired no statues but our faces, To dwell there incognito, glad we never Can dwell on what they suffered, loved or were. Earth grew them as a bay grows fishermen Or hills a shepherd. While they breathed, the air All breathe took on a virtue; in our blood, If we allow them, they can breathe again: Happy their wish and mild to flower and flood. XXI (To E.M. Forster) Though Italy and King's are far away, And Truth a subject only bombs discuss, Our ears unfriendly, still you speak to us, Insisting that the inner life can pay. As we dash down the slope of hate with gladness, You trip us up like an unnoticed stone, And, just when we are closeted with madness, You interrupt us like the telephone. Yes, we are Lucy, Turton, Philip: we Wish international evil, are delighted To join the jolly ranks of the benighted Where reason is denied and love ignored, But, as we swear our lie, Miss Avery Comes out into the garden with a sword. Sekundärliteratur 1985 Jean-Paul Forster : Auden's Sonnets from China is a good illustration of the nature of Auden's experimentation and of its relation to tradition. When the cycle first appeared under the title In time of war in Journey to a war, it formed the natural emotional climax of an experienc4e of disillusion and a poetical summing-up of the travel book. The sonnets deny and blur the distinction between history and discourse, past and present, rather than underline it. As is customary with sonnet sequences, Sonnets from China is not organized according to a consistent pattern. It presents a juxtaposition of pictures. This juxtaposition of what are for the most part portraits and scenes does, offer a fairly systematic survey of social and political life. If there is any order in the way the sonnets are arranged, it is social and not chronologically historical. The division into two groups of equal length would rather correspond to a distinction between sonnets dealing with ruling ideologies, masters and profiteers (sonnets I-IX) and those dealing with the victims and manipulated (sonnets X, XII-XVII). The sonnets consider in turn farmers, tyrants, soothsayers, poets, politicians, religious leaders, soldiers, wounded men in a hospital, gardeners, chauffeurs and exiles, as well as different aspects of life and social institutions. Each sonnet tells the story of a failure and there remains no doubt that the cycle is but an impressionistic survey of social and political life. Auden uses the conciseness and compactness of the sonnet form to present caricatures : striking, distorted pictures in which the distortion becomes denunciation. The poet combines past and present, ancient and modern features to create composite pictures of different sorts of life and types of men. The result is ahistorical. The first sonnet is a caricature of the Darwinian evolutionary myth, but it also shows that man escapes Darwin's determinism, though he is incapable of making use of his freedom. The fifth and eighth sonnets are caricatures of the tyrannical and liberal leaders of all times, and the twelfth of war as lived by the private soldier, who never fully understands what is really happening. Sonnets from China is one of Auden's ambitious projects and typical creations in the second half of the thirties. He has found a new way of using the sonnet form. With their style and tone akin to those of reporting, the individual poems are like hasty magazine snapshots or political cartoons : this is what the historical and political vignette has become in the cycle. The very looseness of the form becomes expressive comment when it shows that man has lost his true nature as the sonnet has lost its true character. 1991 Edward Callan : Many of these sonnets are not directly about the war in China. The poems are wartime reflections on the human condition and on the role of the artist in time of war. The first three sonnets constitute a prologue on the evolution of human consciousness. They imply that only plants and animals are innocent or good by nature, and that man may use his freedom for either good or evil as he chooses. The next seven, a retrospect of human history markedly anti-Romantic and far from Marxist in outlook, combine the evocation of a series of historical epochs with portraits of personified types who supplied successive ages with models of heroic personality : the agriculturalist, the soldier, the prophet, the poet, and so on. The Sonnet X is an sonnet on the Enlightenment. Its theme is that the Enlightenment, by banishing the mythical, the mysterious, and the illogical, prepared the way for their reappearance in the unconscious. Auden made the culmination of the retrospective survey of his own Western, intellectual heritage – a placement that gives weight to its questioning of wholly rational values (expressed elsewhere in his view that Hitler's rise in a center of humane learning cast doubt on the proposition that liberalism was self-supporting). Since this sonnet was composed in 1936, prior to Auden's visit to Spain and China, it confirms that the stages of his return to Anglicanism enumerated in Modern Canterbury Pilgrims are stated in exact sequence. The second half of Sonnets from China moves on to the immediate situation in China by way of a transitional sonnet affirming the value of song. There follows a group of sonnets dealing directly with scenes from the war, with individual sonnets devoted to the dead, the wounded, air-raids, diplomats exchanging views, and so on. |
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| 33 | 1976 |
Isherwood, Christopher. Christopher and his kind. (London : Methuen, 1976). "China had become one of the world's decisive battlegrounds. And unlike Spain, it was not already corwded with star literary reporters." He reported Auden saying : "We'll have a war of our very own." |
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Bibliography (5)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1939 | Auden, W.H. ; Isherwood, Christopher. Journey to a war. (New York, N.Y. : Random House ; London : Faber & Faber, 1939). = Auden, W.H. Journey to a war. (New York, N.Y. : Octagon Books, 1972).= Rev. ed. (London : Faber and Faber, 1973). [Enthält : Sonnets from China].[Bericht über die Jahre 1937-1945]. | Publication / Aud5 |
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| 2 | 1941 |
[Auden, W.H. ; Isherwood, Christopher]. Zai zhan shi : shi si xing lian tis hi bing fu shi jie. W.H. Aodeng zhu ; Zhu Weiji yi. (Shanghai : Shi ge shu dian, 1941). (Shi ge fan yi cong shu ; 2). Übersetzung von Auden, W.H. ; Isherwood, Christopher. Journey to a war. (New York, N.Y. : Random House ; London : Faber & Faber, 1939). 在戰時 : 十四行聯體詩並附詩解 |
Publication / Aud1 | |
| 3 | 1941 |
[Auden, W.H.]. Zai zhan shi. Aodeng ; Zhu Weiji yi. (Shanghai : Shi ge shu dian, 1941). (Shi ge fan yi cong shu ; 2). [Übersetzung von Gedichten von W.H. Auden]. 在战时 |
Publication / Aud3 | |
| 4 | 1980-1985 |
Auden, W.H. Shi wu shou. Aodun ; Bian Zhilin yi. [Five poems]. In : Wai guo xian dai pai zuo pin xuan. Vol. 4 [ID D16726]. 诗五首 |
Publication / YuanK2.73 |
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| 5 | 2005 |
[Auden, W.H.]. Xue shu tu ya : Aodeng qing ti shi ji. Aodeng zhu ; Sang Ki yi ; Qi Bing tu. (Suzhou : Gu wu xuan chu ban she, 2005). Übersetzung von Auden, W.H. Academic graffiti. Illustrated by Filippo Sanjust. (London : Faber and Faber, 1971). 学术涂鸦奧登轻体诗集 |
Publication / Aud2 |
Secondary Literature (13)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1971 | Levitin, Alexis. A study in revision : W.H. Auden's "A voyage" and "Sonnets from China". Diss. Columbia University, 1971. MS. | Publication / Aud8 | |
| 2 | 1979 | Finney, Brian. Christopher Isherwood : a critical biography. (New York, N.Y. : Oxford University Press, 1979). | Publication / Aud13 | |
| 3 | 1983 | Haffenden, John. W.H. Auden : the critical heritage. (London : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983). (Critical heritage series). | Publication / Aud10 |
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| 4 | 1985 | Forster, Jean-Paul. W.H. Auden's "Sonnets from China" : poems in search of context. In : Spell ; vol. 2 (1985). | Publication / Aud7 | |
| 5 | 1991 | Callan, Edward. From Auden : A carnival of intellect (Sonnets from China). In : Critical essays on W.H. Auden. Ed. by George W. Bahlke. (New York, N.Y. : G.K. Hall, 1991). (Critical essays on British literature). | Publication / Aud4 |
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| 6 | 1995 | Davenport-Hines, Richard. Auden. (London : Heinemann, 1995). | Publication / Aud14 | |
| 7 | 2002 | Christie, Stuart. Orienteering : the experimental East in Auden's "Sonnets from China". In : Before and after Suzie : Hong Kong in Western film and literature. Ed. by Thomas Y.T. Luk and James P. Rice. ( Hong Kong : Chinese University Press, 2002). | Publication / Aud15 | |
| 8 | 2005 |
Christie, Stuart. Disorientations : Canon without context in Auden's "Sonnets from China". In : PMLA ; vol. 120, no 5 ( Oct, 2005). http://www.jstor.org/stable/25486269. |
Publication / Aud6 | |
| 9 | 2007 |
Monteiro, George. Auden on Macao. In : Notes on Contemporary Literature, Vol. 37, No. 3 (2007) http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Auden+on+Macao.-a0185166824 |
Publication / Aud9 |
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| 10 | 2007 | Haughton, Hugh. Journeys to war : W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and William Empson in China. In : A century of travels in China : critical essays on travel writing from the 1840s to the 1940s. Ed. by Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn. (Hong Kong : Hong Kong University Press, 2007). | Publication / Aud16 | |
| 11 | 2007 |
A century of travels in China : critical essays on travel writing from the 1840s to the 1940s. Ed. by Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn. (Hong Kong : Hong Kong University Press, 2007). www.oapen.org/download?type=document&docid=448539. |
Publication / KerrD1 |
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| 12 | 2013 |
Wystan Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Vandeleur Grayburn (1) 'Just the natives fighting'. http://brianedgar.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/auden-isherwood-grayburn/. http://brianwedgar.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/wystan-auden-christopher-isherwood-and.html. |
Web / Aud11 |
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| 13 | 2013 | Brown, Douglas. Sissywood vs. Alleyman : going nose to nose in Shanghai. In : Brady, Anne-Marie; Brown, Douglas, eds. Foreigners and foreign institutions in Republican China. (London : Routledge, 2013). [Betr. W.H. Auden, Christopher Ishgerwood]. | Publication / Aud17 |